Siemens, Intel to Develop Blood Bank System for Malaysian Hospitals

I suggest that you file the following story (see: Siemens, Intel To Develop Blood Bank Management System For Malaysian Hospitals) in your "I Really Don't Believe This" file.

[Siemens and Intel] are teaming up to...[develop] BloodBank Manager systems for 334 public and private hospitals in Malaysia. The system uses radio frequency identification (RFID) technology to simplify the registration and recording of screening results during blood donation, as well as smart cabinets for storing blood bags. The system improves identification, cross-matching, inventory, logistics and lab system interfaces. It also allows the creation of patient profiles, inventory reports, as well as donation and transaction history. [A spokesman] said the BloodBank Manager will ensure transparency and accountability as well as efficient handling of blood bags through the logging, labeling and tracking of blood products via RFID. He also said that the system reduces waiting time, errors and mismatches. According to Malaysia's Deputy Health Minister..., hospitals in the country carry out over 500,000 blood transfusions every year. He said the BloodBank Manager will help avoid errors in the testing of donated blood and delivery of blood to patients.

I have the following urgent message for Siemens, Intel, and the various government officials in Malaysia who negotiated this contract:

• Developing a blood bank computer system for even a single small hospital is a project that will reduce grown men to tears; developing a system for an entire country will certainly be even more complex. Siemens and Intel are superb companies but are they just a little outside of their core competencies here?
  
• Developing a blood bank system is NOT a simple software engineering project. Tracking blood bank units with RFID chips may be way cool but the major challenge when developing such a system will be recording the blood types of patients and  getting crossmatched units transfused to the "correct" patients. The blood bank module of the LIS is more challenging than all of the others including microbiology, combining the critical integration of lab data with blood product selection and delivery. The system also needs to deal with an inventory of multiple perishable products with differing expiration dates.
• Simple computer errors in blood banking software can easily kill patients. Blood bank software is the only healthcare software that the FDA has chosen to regulate. This regulatory environment plus the complexity of the software has caused many of the U.S. vendors, previously active in this area, to defer to a small number of domain experts.

This press release definitely touched on all of the key healthcare and LIS buzz words -- transparency, accountability, and efficiency. Let's just see how this one goes over the long haul.